Smartphones, which are personal digital assistants with mobile phone capabilities, are becoming widespread. In addition to mobile phone capabilities, smartphones have multiple capabilities, including Web browsing and executing application programs, packed in highly portable, small hardware. Conventional mobile phones have allowed Web browsing and have been capable of executing application programs. These functions of the mobile phones are similar to functions executed on general-purpose personal computers (PCs) connected to another PC or a server computer through the Internet. However, ordinary mobile phones are unable to directly obtain services made available to PCs. That is, these functions of mobile phones are implemented by obtaining services specifically designed for mobile phones and provided by mobile phone carriers.
Smartphones, on the other hand, allow browsing of Web sites constructed for PCs through direct connection to the Internet. That is, while mobile phones access sites for mobile phones provided by mobile phone carriers to browse information written in an HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) specifically designed for mobile phones, smartphones allow direct browsing of HTML pages designed for PCs. Accordingly, Web site providers do not need to construct specialized Web pages for smartphones, which are required for mobile phones. For Web sites for mobile phones, various techniques that facilitate construction of Web pages that fit to devices having small displays, such as mobile phones have been proposed (for example see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2010-288243). Although construction of Web pages for mobile phones has become easier, separate Web pages for mobile phones need to be constructed independently of Web sites for PCs and therefore need to be maintained and managed separately from Web sites for PCs. Therefore, not many Web site providers are operating both of sites for PCs and sites for mobile phones.
On the other hand, smartphones allows browsing of PC Web sites without adaptations and therefore Web pages do not need to be written in an HTML specifically designed for smartphones. In this respect, smartphones have an advantage over mobile phones as mobile information devices. However, smartphones have shortcomings such as small screen sizes and difficulties in inputting characters and other data, like mobile phones. Thus, smartphones are not necessarily satisfactory in the ease of browsing and operation.
Therefore there are Web site operators that construct Web sites that fit smartphones on the basis of Web pages designed for PCs. For example, parts of a Web page designed for PCs that are irrelevant can be reduced in size or deleted to fit the page to the display size of smartphones, thereby constructing a Web page more usable to the users of smartphones.
The way of displaying a Web page can be changed by modifying a file called CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) which acts on HTML tags and defines the appearance of Web pages. For example, information written in HTML that contains a tag <TABLE>, which defines a table, can be displayed in a format that fit the display of a smartphone to some extent by setting <WIDTH>, which is a property defining the width of a table, to 50%.